Name: Seminar Culture, Consumption, and the Politics of Public Space in Mexico City
Start: 2026-04-15T10:30:00+02:00
Location: Żurawia 4, Warszawa, 00-503 Warsaw, Poland

Seminar Culture, Consumption, and the Politics of Public Space in Mexico City

Traditional Markets in Transition: Culture, Consumption, and the Politics of Public Space in Mexico City
PhD. Ma. Susana Rosales – El Colegio de México
In this conference I´m to talk about the transition of 329 public markets that are currently in operation, as part of an extensive commercial infrastructure designed to supply basic consumer goods to a significant sector of the urban population These included concerns over hygiene and territorial planning in a context of high migration flows, rapid urban expansion, and increasing demand for services; as well as the growth of street vending and the proliferation of unregulated commercial spaces on the city’s peripheries (Giglia, 2018; Ochoa, 2002).
During the period of a protected economy, when the state intervened in price regulation, established a social provisioning system aimed at vulnerable groups, and structured a retail trade pattern around a central wholesale market in urban areas (Torres, 1999, 2011), public markets (also referred to as traditional or local markets) haved a key role in ensuring food sovereignty across different parts of the city.
However, since the 1980s, as a result of economic liberalization, there has been a shift from a traditional supply pattern—characterized by multiple stages of intermediation between production regions and consumption spaces, and by diverse retail channels such as public markets and small neighborhood stores—to a more modernized and streamlined model. This newer model is a result by a large commercial firms represented by supermarkets and chain stores that functionally respond to segmented and differentiated urban food demands (Torres, 2011:65).
In this context, this speech aims to analyze the characteristics of urban consumption within public markets, drawing on the perspectives of consumers themselves.
To address these questions, this conference proposes a view of the practices and experiences of urban consumers in public markets in Mexico City, linking them to broader processes of urban transformation that shape the immediate contexts of these spaces.
This presentation contributes to the fields of urban consumption studies and research on the dynamics of food provisioning markets in the city. Contemporary studies of urban consumption have tended to overlook the situated experiences of consumers, instead focusing on the structural conditions under which consumption takes place and the challenges consumers face. My speech emphasizes existing gaps in the understanding of consumption dynamics in traditional markets, connecting them to processes of urban transformation and proposing an analytical perspective.